Chasing evil guys with Google’s help

Posted by nicoulas on 0

Hi there,
Today I want to relate my recent trilateral discussion about a VLC-related legal topic.

Last week, Sam came across the following website: http://apps.flowmix.net/vlc/. He sighed, and I was like “so what? it’s great Videolan makes some VLC advertising”… But after he told me to look at the URL, I understood. I understood that this is neither official Videolan ad, nor especially good news.

Indeed, running (with wine) the proposed windows-only executable shows that this seemingly free advertising may have a cost…

screenshot1
An illegal license change can be so easy… Presented as the VLC license, this out-of-context chimera will probably be clicked through.

Why not try to install something else, when we're at it?
Why not try to install something else, when we're at it?
And finally, try to connect to the Internet… As anecdotal as that ;).
And finally, try to connect to the Internet… As anecdotal as that ;).

You will have guessed, the actual VLC windows installer (available here) does not ask for any of that, and presents the GPLv2 license!

So what? What can we do? Taking the website down would need to ask Google to stop linking to it… Wait a minute! Can’t we do that? Well according to the FTF,this is exactly what there is to do. Google won’t answer to kind emails, you would be better off sending them a DMCA notice.

I proposed this to the Videolan people, because only they, as owner of the product, can report a copyright infringement. Let’s see how what comes out…